Martin – Page 208 – WirelessMoves

3G vs. Wi-Fi – Then and Now

The battle continues… I can still remember, it must have been 5 or 6 years ago when there was a big debate over which system would win, UMTS or Wi-Fi. It was a strange debate, as even then it was clear that Wi-Fi aimed at homes and hotspots while UMTS aimed for wide area coverage. The whole municipal Wi-fi wave only came and went a couple of years later. Today, Wi-Fi is used ubiquitously in homes and as far as the Wi-Fi hotspots in Europe and elsewhere go, they are held mostly alive by high roaming charges and better coverage where no 3G in-house coverage is available. Also, there are some niche opportunities like for example in trains. I'd say it's a peaceful co-existence today.

As mobile networks are getting more and more traffic these days, the discussion seems to stir up again, this time against the background of whether UMTS femtos or Wi-Fi is better for 3G macro network offloading. In the end, I'm sure peaceful co-existence will prevail. Once femots are nicely integrated together with today's Wi-Fi access points that include an access device (think DSL, coax or fiber modem), the re-merger of fixed and wireless network operators will open the door to femto acceptance in homes. And as far as public hotspots are concerned I think combined devices also make the most sense, especially if the Wi-Fi hotspot operator is also a UMTS network operator.

So even in this area, I see a peaceful coexistence for both technologies in the long run.

Mobile Multitasking

David Wood recently wrote an interesting post on why he thinks multitasking on mobile devices is not only nice to have but rather despite still not all smartphones support it today. However, Symbian based devices have supported this for many years and it's one of the reasons why I'm a Nokia N- and Eseries fan boy. But let's put it to the test, which programs am I running simultaneously on my mobile (see picture on the left):

Profimail to receive e-mail.
The phone configuration utility. Always running so I can get quickly to some often used functions such as 2G/3G network selection, call forwarding, etc.
Nokia maps. Especially important when traveling
Opera Mini
The clock and alarm application
A counter application that shows my data usage
The SMS program
The screenshot program

And sometimes there's also the music player, the podcast client, the calender, the address book and more running in the background in addition to the list above. Not necessarily because they all need to run but because there is no need to quit them as they don't consume resources while they sit in the background and by letting them run I can get to them really fast and pick up from where I left them.

Returning to the last state is a really important feature for me, especially with the maps application and Opera Mini. In Opera Mini it's a joy to instantly return to it after doing something else and to be able to quickly go back several pages without a new reload. And as far as the maps application is concerned it's great to see where I was last and to have a new GPS fix within a couple of seconds.

Sure, to some degree this can be 'simulated' by saving the state of the application before it is quit. However, returning to the application and restoring the state costs time. But why simulate it when you can have the real thing?

6 Years Ago

… when I wrote my first book, mobile phones where just that, phones. A small screen, black and white only, the processor running at a couple of megahertz and Java ME was a concept in the mind of some but not yet in many devices. And now look at what happened in little more than half a decade: Mobile phones with processors running at speeds beyond half a gigahertz, big color screens, touch sensitive displays, multi megapixel cameras, video recording functionality, GPS, Wi-Fi, etc. etc. Even very low end phones for a couple of Euros have a color screen these days. Not with a very high display resolution but 6 years ago, that would have been truly revolutionary. How quickly times change in the mobile industry!

Multi-SIM for the Hyperconnected

As more and more people use cellular networks not only to make phone calls but also to access the Internet, the desire to use more than one connected device at the same time is on the rise. The problem: Paying a basic fee for each device and then maybe again for Internet access is often financially not very attractive. But even if you cross that bridge and end up with a couple of gigabytes included for one device and another couple of gigabytes for another device, in the end, you might not even use all the data included in one bucket despite having two devices.

A solution for some cases is a 3G to Wi-Fi Router which works well when devices are close together and you want to share access with a group of people. However, it doesn't work so well when on the move and using several devices at once. But here's an interesting solution:

I found out recently that most German operators offer so called “Multi-SIM” cards. All SIM cards, usually up to three, are registered to the same phone number and can be active simultaneously. Incoming calls are forwarded to all switched-on devices and and the call can be accepted or rejected with any of them.

I've had a look at the fine print of one operator and here, Internet use with a single monthly bucket, even simultaneously on more than one device, is explicitly allowed! Some operators want a one time activation charge for each SIM card, but monthly charges for all SIM cards on a single contract range between very modest and free. Very nice! This will solve a big issue for people with netbooks that have a built in 3G adapter and who want to use a smartphone or other wireless device at the same time. Throw a further slim phone into the equation that can be used with the thrid SIM card and the Multi-SIM approach becomes even better.

But that's Germany, are there similar offers in other countries?

MWC 2010 – 3G Bandwidth Report from the Showfloor – Part 2

There we go, it's the last day of MWC 2010 and time to give an update on how the 3G networks fare on the Fira in Barcelona. As reported at the beginning of the show throughput on the day before the exhibition started was around 450 kbyte/s with a Cat 8 stick (for details see the earlier report) and there was still respectable throughput once the networks started to see some load on the first day between 150 – 300 kbyte/s.

Throughout the week I used one of the 3G networks heavily on the Fira not only for testing but also to get background information and of course for e-mail and the experience was always excellent. The 150 – 300 kbyte/s I experienced the first day was pretty throughout the other days as well. In other words the networks were quite capable to absorb the voice and data traffic of the 35.000 simultaneous visitors.

Some more numbers: While I focused on hall 8 in the first report, let's look at the setup in hall 2: On the ground level, there are 5 UMTS cells each operator has deployed. Some operators have deployed 3x 5MHz carriers, some 'only' 2. In total there were 4 (operators) x 5 (cells, freq 1) + 4 x 5 (freq 2) + 2 x 5 (freq 3) = 50 carriers. In addition there are two cells per operator on the smaller first level of the hall. That's another 10 carriers. Separation between them is quite good so bandwidth per carrier should be around 4 MBit/s. 4 Mbit/s x 60 carriers = 240 MBit/s of potentially available bandwidth over the 3G networks in hall 2 alone. Subtract from that some bandwidth for voice calls from mobile devices not using the deployed GSM network there.

For the whole of the exhibition ground I counted + estimated around 30 independent cells per operator, each with 2 or 3 carriers each. That would be around 300 carriers in total used to cover the ground there. That's well over 1 Gbit/s of available bandwidth over the air, plus, of course, the capacity provided by the 2G layer. And even that's probably only little compared to the total available bandwidth when you count all the Ethernet based Internet access used on the stands to connect the exhibitor equipment there to the net. Breathtaking!

MWC 2010 – Skype and Interconnection

In general, Skype works great over the 3G network I am using here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. However, there's one little glitch I've observed that has nothing to do with the 3G network here that Skype might want to take a look at:

Already some years ago I have wondered if interconnection would become an issue with the rise of VoIP based PSTN alternatives. And indeed I can see signs these days of not everything working as it should. Case in point with Skype: I am not able to call my VoIP SIP line at home. Whenever I try I get a "call refused" while just before or after I can call the line just fine from my mobile phone. Looks like wherever Skype connects to in order to reach German fixed line numbers the system is unable to route to a ported phone number. Some room for improvement here!

MWC 2010 – Meet the Big – Meet the Small

One thing I really like about the Mobile World Congress is that while the news is obviously dominated by the big players like network vendors (think Ericsson, NSN, Huawei, etc.), mobile device vendors (think Nokia, HTC, Samsung, etc.) and software companies (think Microsoft, Google, etc.), the majority of companies being here in terms of numbers are small companies and start-ups with specific products to show them to their potential customers. And the customers are not necessarily in the mobile space as I have learnt today so probably quite a good percentage of the visitors are not working in the mobile domain.

An example: By chance I ran into Jon Arne Saeteras today, whom I met a couple of weeks ago when presenting at Mobile Monday Oslo. Here in Barcelona, he's the one on stage presenting the mobile web publishing products of Mobiletech, a company out of Norway and with a couple of dozen employees, so quite small compared to the tens of thousands of employees of the big players in the mobile industry. And an international stage is just what the company needs. Their customers, newspapers and other content produces looking to expand their reach to mobile, are not only from the nordic countries, but also from the US like the Washington post and other parts of the world. To me, it's always amazing how technology today enables even smaller companies today to compete on a global scale.

MWC 2010 – On The Path Of Today’s Reality

I can remember Mobile World Congresses or 3GSMWorldCongresses in the past in which future network developments were marketed quite aggressively. Long before HSPA networks were launched, the technology was heavily promoted, marketed and discussed during the event, sometimes a bit too obsessively for my taste. Fact and fiction were often very close. CEO's and other high ranking people were running around with prototype mobiles only to appear on the market years later to show them of. On the network side, vendors were spending big time money to praise their 3G network developments on big banners.

On this year's MWC it seems to be a bit different to me. With LTE at the doorstep I was a bit surprised to find that there isn't really much of a hype around it. Sure you can find demos if you look for them, and the technical background of them are quite impressive as well. However, most companies are far more interested to show you their latest and greatest stuff to be in the stores tomorrow. Some realism setting in I suppose and a sign that HSPA networks in general with maybe a few exceptions carry the current data traffic well.

So to me it looks like MWC has arrived from the future to the today.

MWC 2010 – Opera Mini Graphical Stats

The Opera Mini fan boy I am due to its superior web browsing experience compared to pretty much anything else, I had to go over to Opera's stand and pay them a visit. No, they didn't show OperaMini running on the iPhone so I guess Steve did not show up at the airport. Anyway, what they had at their stand was a very impressive real-time display of where and how much Opera Mini is used around the world. Since Opera Mini uses network side compression servers, page hits are easy to count. The picture on the left shows what's going on in Europe when I visited the booth at around 5 pm yesterday. Lots of hits per second in the UK, Germany and eastern European countries, much less in Spain and France though. I wonder why that is so? No agreements with network operators there to pre-install Opera Mini? Here are some stats from a couple of semi randomly selected countries:

UK: 90 hits/s
Germany: 37 hits/s
Russia: 3000 hits/s (according to Opera, one of their biggest Mini markets!)
Egypt: 48 hits/s
South Africa: 422 hits/s
Nigeria: 150 hits/s

When I look at these stats it looks like in western European countries, even those with a strong Opera Mini use compared to Spain and France, network operators and users totally underestimate the power of server side compression when it comes to mobile web surfing speed and the bill at the end of the month.

MWC 2010 – NTT DoCoMo Labs USA Shows Remote Home Control

I was glad to see NTT DoCoMo USA labs showing a remote home control demonstration today, with Z-Wave connected power plugs to control appliances (think lights, coffee machines, etc.), a control center connected to the outside world with a 3G module and an app on mobile devices. Either from the central control server or from the mobile device you can check the current state of different appliances and switch them on or off.

Yes, the concept is certainly not new but so far practical implementations have not been very far spread. This one looks a lot closer to real life than what I have seen so far. Sorry for the somewhat blurry pictures on the left, need to bring a better camera or hold it more steady next time. And for all of you who wonder why I report on this seemingly quite off the beaten path topic, well, I think remote home control is an important ingredient in future network operator supplied service bundles.